Chefs in Shanghai Say It's Still the Wild, Wild East

The thing that hit me first when I poked my head into a Shanghai food market was how fresh the produce looked, stacked high on tables in the dimly lit, concrete-floored building. The industrial processing and centralized distribution that is the mainstay of American food shopping is conspicuously absent—there are no plastic-wrapped trays of meat or sealed baggies of salad. Hell, there's barely any light. You walk up to the person behind those stacks of shiny eggplant and bundles of leeks, and point and buy: lush, fragrant piles of shiitake mushrooms; garlic so fresh the skins are squeaky; bunches of scallions with clumps of dirt clinging to the roots that are usually thrown into your bag for free. It's one of the most conflicting experiences in China—so filthy, but so intriguing.

Despite the flies and the smells, it's difficult to walk into a market (no matter what your mindset) and leave empty-handed. "Chicken and pork here are vastly superior. [Because of] people's awareness of seasonal ingredients, [there's a] better sense of the balance of seasons. People are infinitely closer to food than in the States," says chef Austin Hu. "Access to decent, honest food is closer. Cooking fresh food, going to the market every day—that's a reality here. Those are all beautiful things."

Still, sourcing ingredients for a Western restaurant in China can be "an uphill battle," says Hu, chef and owner of Madison, a fine dining restaurant in Shanghai that has been open for five years, a span of time that translates into roughly 15 years anywhere else. China is "more messy, wilder, unregulated" when it comes to food production, though he argues that the reputation China has for poor food safety is misplaced. "Food safety all over the world is bad. The US is horrible. The E. coli outbreak in Germany—how many people died?"

In pricey Shanghai, where finding a small packet of blueberries for less than $6 is a thrill, food costs are no doubt always on a chef's mind, especially if that chef is cooking Western cuisine. Hu uses only domestically sourced ingredients—a practice that may seem both business-savvy and masochistic. Finding a supplier that can consistently provide quality ingredients is tougher in China than you could imagine. There's always a story about a meat guy who decided to disappear that week, or the difficulty of finding beets that aren't just "big dark red balls of flavorless, sugarless sand farts."

Dinner mains at Madison stay within a price range of about $24 to $32, a feat in China, where that specialty food producer is significantly harder to come by. Still, Hu maintains that cost is less of a concern, advising, "Don't play the cost game. Play the quality game."

In China, due diligence is the key to sleuthing out quality products on a consistent basis, which is often the trickiest aspect of sourcing for Western chefs in a country where shortsightedness can seem like a local pastime. Even for Hu, who could arguably be seen as the locavore godfather, there are wins and losses. He could be hanging out for hours in the countryside, chatting up two young duck egg purveyors and scoring "phenomenal" product. The next week can bring an utter disappointment—tracking down and buying a flat of Concord-like grapes only to find that most of the paper-wrapped bunches contain a cheaper (and unusable) variety.

For chefs in smaller venues, keeping a focused menu is a major advantage to offering value and quality. The task for Vinh Nguyen, chef founder of Shanghai's Grumpy Pig, was to develop a menu "using ingredients that were fresh and basic and could be ordered, handled, and maintained by two to three Chinese line cooks daily" in a kitchen about the size of a dining table. Initially hired for a six-month consulting gig, Nguyen stayed for over two years, seeing the restaurant through a re-branding and a bar opening.

Staying flexible, says Nguyen, now executive chef at Brooklyn's Selamat Pagi, was how he adjusted as an American chef cooking in China. "There's always gonna be compromises in your kitchen, but you're a chef. You're trained to adjust professionally, so you can curate your menu," he says. For example, "the bacon in China sucks, so I started making my own."

The pork-intensive, Asian comfort food menu at the casual eatery made it relatively easy to source ingredients; as the primary animal protein in China, pork is plentiful, affordable, and enviably fresh. It also happens to be source of fixation for owner Gary Wang, whose obsession with pork is something of local legend, driving his own quest to find tasty belly and neck cuts and subsequently saving Nguyen the effort.

Still, says Nguyen, "there were the typical days where our baker lost an employee and we had to send out three search parties for ciabatta rolls." Of specially ordered noodles, "I'd lose four bags alone just from the handling of the box. Probably some group of Chinese kids jumping up and down on them," he jokes. To compensate, he began stockpiling hard-to-come-by ingredients like those rolls, or tomato juice for Bloody Marys and cheese for the burgers.

As a chef in a smaller venue, Nguyen handled finding "exotic" ingredients as any expat worth his salt would—buying rice noodles for pho (less common in northern China regions) online on Taobao (China's equivalent of eBay) or asking friends heading to Japan to hand-carry a few bottles of yuzu kosho back for a house special cocktail. Anything not available from a local seller or exorbitantly expensive was minimized as a matter of practicality.

Nguyen reflects on his stint as a Western chef in a smaller venue in Shanghai as a challenge that could some days seem insurmountable: "the human resources and the availability of ingredients is ridiculous. Unless you're [one of the celebrity chefs] which… expat and locals put on a pedestal, purveyors don't come a-knocking, nor do Chinese cooks, or any other resource that helps offset the challenge of building dishes with what's around you. Meanwhile, it seems like a city where, if you can dream it and make it, some desperate [person] is gonna pay [$24] for a sandwich or a hot dog."

OK, yes, maybe I've done that.